Ms. Alyona Minkovski was kind enough to have me back on her show to discuss what’s going on with the bizarre Michael Furlong/AfPax/NY Times “private spies for hire” thing.

Yes, that was over Skype, yes it was a terrible connection, yes that is medical tape barely holding my glasses together, and yes I need to buy a lamp or something.

Anand Gopal has an excellent piece on Marjeh before Moshtarak:

Many Marjah residents say that the two years of Taliban rule were better than the six years of Afghan government rule that preceded it. The Taliban ruling apparatus was not sophisticated, but for the rugged, simple town of Marjah it met the bare-minimum requirements. This was not necessarily a positive appraisal of the Taliban; rather it was an indictment of the Afghan government and its Western backers…

The Taliban’s protection of the drug economy—which many in Marjah are involved in—and the provision of rudimentary services (judiciary, policing, and some development) won them support from the local population.

It’s a point I’ve repeated here ad nauseum as well. Good on him for seeking out locals to talk to.

The reservoir that was.

This just in – a dam burst in Kazakhstan killing dozens and injuring hundreds.  A particularly quick Wiki-response was in the offing, perhaps due to the romanticized notions of famous dam-burstings and their apocalyptic wrath.  This particular dam is identified as the “Kyzyl-Agash” [Red Tree] dam, which I guess provides electricity and/or water for drinking/agriculture for the nearby town of Kyzyl-Agash.  The official response has been typically harsh, and the search for a scapegoat has already begun.  Considering the sorry state of even the US’s infrastructure, it doesn’t take a particularly brave leap of faith to assume Kazakhstan’s is also below par.  Nor can I say this response from Kazakhstan is unexpected, considering any democracy’s knee-jerk reaction to public disaster is a lynch mob.  [See?  Kazakhstan IS a democracy!]

My heart goes out to the people, and I hope that they made find help and comfort with friends and family next week with the coming of spring and the Наурыз holiday.  Perhaps the town will cease to exist, as I imagine the reservoir was an important source of water, employment, electricity, and irrigation.  If the dam is rebuilt, one can hope its maintenance will be taken seriously and plans made for a dam capable of withstanding any level of spring snow-melt.

This particular dam was not particularly close to any large urban areas, being rather close to the Kazakh-Chinese border, about a third of the way from Almaty up to Ust’ [Өскемен].  To make recovery and repair problems worse, the town and dam are on the “far side” of Lake Balkhash, quite off the beaten path of developed Kazakhstan.

Perhaps I am not alone in being reminded of this story, which pops up every couple of years to titillate and terrorize global readers.  Tajikistan, being home to a lot of water at high elevation, is the atomic bomb factory of “Gravity+Water=Chaos” equations.  This terror of the possible disaster might well be fed by the American culture of Disaster Scenarios, and our own terrible history of dam tragedies, topped off by the unspeakable terror of the Johnstown nightmare of the late 19th century.  A dam burst, killing over 2000 people in a deluge beyond biblical proportions, forcing narrators to empty their pockets of all the horrible adjectives and Revelations-strewn metaphors in their attempts to describe the terror felt by the eye-witnesses and stranded survivors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in the New York Times:

Good government will matter little, though, if the local economy is in a shambles. Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment.

In Helmand, opium is the only way farmers can acquire credit: they take out small loans, called salaam, from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials, often in units of poppy seed, and pay back that loan in opium paste after harvest. If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their loan — a very dangerous proposition.

Western aid groups distributed wheat seeds last fall, but there was little follow-up and it seems few farmers used them. This year, the aid workers should be prepared to pay farmers compensation for any opium crops they are unable to harvest as a result of the fighting, and the Western coalition should help the groups develop a microcredit system.

Behold:

The swift American-led military offensive that drove the Taliban from power in this southern Afghan farm belt came at an inopportune time for the area’s poppy farmers. That’s created a quandary for Marjah’s new, U.S.-backed leaders and for the American military as they try to transform this sweltering river valley, whose biggest cash crop is opium poppy, into a tranquil breadbasket.

“The helicopters are landing in my field,” the weathered farmer told Fennell as they sat in the dirt outside the Marines’ newest forward operating base in Marjah. “You have to stop landing there. Next time, the Taliban will put an IED in the field,” an improvised explosive device, the military’s term for a homemade bomb.

Unfortunately, the Marines are refusing to compensate farmers for any damage they cause to their poppy fields. This is counterproductive—as the farmer himself strongly hinted, there remain strong ties to the Taliban in the area (more on that below): the Taliban, in fact, rescued Marjeh from predatory government officials some time ago and had set up a relatively stable set of economic and judicial institutions. If the Marines are going to destroy those, and there are many reasons why they should, they have to immediately provide alternatives or risk brutalizing the very people they need to win over.

Unfortunately, the Marines in Marjah seem determined to stamp out opium—a far cry from the clear thinking that accompanied their first deployment to Helmand in 2008, when they vowed to resolutely ignore the opium and focus on more important things (seriously: focusing on opium instead of almost anything else badly misses the point).

There’s no time to waste. In that same NYT article, I wrote:

Last, progress on these other fronts will do nothing if the Taliban return, which means a significant number of troops must stay for at least a year. Gen. David Petraeus, head of the Central Command, has said that Marja was merely an “initial salvo” in an 18-month campaign to also retake neighboring Kandahar Province, the birthplace of the Taliban. Kandahar is Afghanistan’s second-largest city, so it is reasonable to assume that many troops will be pulled out of Marja for that campaign…

At a minimum, at least two battalions should stay in Marja permanently, to undergird the new government. They shouldn’t build a new base outside the town for this, or “commute” to the area from strongholds in Helmand like Camp Leatherneck. They should live right inside the town, providing security and guidance from within. You can’t have a “population-centric” counterinsurgency unless you take care of the people.

There are reports emerging from Marjeh that the Taliban is already reasserting itself. While the military ferries Haji Zahir, the new “governor,” to and fro in a helicopter—quite the vote of confidence, considering Marjeh is an area of only a few dozen miles on a side—the Taliban have already begun posting night letters, and beating and even beheading people who cooperate too closely with the U.S. Even so, the barriers to the new government succeeding are basic enough to make me question whether ISAF was lying about having a government in a box ready to go.

“How may of us are from Marjah?” U.S. Marine Col. Randy Newman asked the two-dozen men taking part in the meeting. “None. The Taliban are from Marjah. They have earned some amount of trust of the people. The people trusted the Taliban justice. If we continue in this manner, we will not earn their trust.”

During Sunday’s meeting, the U.S. Army adviser working with Afghan forces told Zahir that the security forces were being constrained because there was no judicial system in place to jail suspected Taliban insurgents turned in by local residents.

We need to sit down and have a very strong discussion about how we’re going to deal with Afghan justice for these men we know are hurting people,” said Matt, who’s advising Afghan police in one section of Marjah. They look at me and smile because they know they’re going to be released within 24 to 48 hours.

“The people of southern Marjah are not going to be confident in our ability to bring security until we can permanently take those men off the battlefield,” he said. “That’s where we earn the population’s trust.”

Again: we destroyed a functioning government and replaced it with borderline-chaos. If the Marines cannot get this under control very quickly, it will turn against them in a very bloody way.

A report in Asia times implies Uzbekistan has gone Mugabe-esque.

Seems that Karimov has ordered the arrest of a whole slew of Uzbekistan’s richest.

And what do you know -
“Uzbek officials are portraying this campaign as a sort of anticorruption drive”

Alternative theories are – “the crackdown could be connected to the president’s daughters. Such reports say Gulnara and Lola are furthering their business interests in Uzbekistan and possibly eliminating obstacles to any succession process ”

Or – “Uzbek authorities could be clearing out the old guard to make way for a new generation that would remain loyal to the Karimov family”

Whichever way you slice it, seems like the Karimov family is tightening its grip in the economic sphere.

This is not likely to be good for economic growth in Uzbekistan.

Today I had the opportunity to hear Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) give a short talk on what he does and what he is trying to do. He had lots of interesting things to say (as someone who went to University of Turin, Moscow State, and Cal-Berkeley in the 60s and 70s should) and had the incredible quip of “I lead prosecution against Terrorism, Drugs, Organized Crime, and Corruption. I basically am the United Nations’ point man for Sinister Affairs.” There were lots of good questions and he made lots of good points, and only a few were truly relevant to what we focus on here. I’m going to focus on one of them that I thought was particularly interesting.

One of the main things Mr. Maria Costa brought to light was the connection between drug use and drug abuse and a dearth of what he calls “Palliative Care,” particularly in the developing world. Using Central Asia as an example, it is very difficult to find a clinic or to find basic pain relieving medication in, say, Turkmenistan. It is also very difficult to deal with depression, post-traumatic stress or other similar ailments through legal means. Drug abuse is, in many ways, the only means of relief for anyone without the correct connections, and Turkmenistan’s current tiff with Medecins Sans Frontieres only accentuates that. There isn’t only a deficiency of general medical competency in Turkmenistan, many of the global initiatives go towards issues such as AIDS, landmines, etc. Post-hoc AIDS treatment, though, is far more expensive per-patient than peremptory anti-needle-abuse care. AIDS education on a general level still really really has to happen, though.

Another thing I thought was interesting, from a legal perspective, is the utter lack of jurisdiction over what he termed “sovereign non-state actors.” ISAF, NATO, UN, etc. treat these transnational terrorist groups with a certain amount of respect when they collate every anti-state actor in Afghanistan as “The Insurgency” in the press, but they and we also realize that they aren’t a monolith at all. Perhaps the greatest success of, um, The Insurgency has been its ability to operate extra-judicially. Even bad folks like ETA, the Medellin Cartel, Sendero Luminoso or what have you were able to be targeted in courts of law. Some were able to overcome that (say, by killing judges who held against them) but the judiciary was still able to be implemented as a weapon against the insurgency. In Afghanistan, the judiciary has been impotent for a whole myriad of reasons. It’ll take some clever reformation in order to form a legal basis that will be able to be used against a transnational insurgency…Guantanamo and the ICC aren’t going to cut it.

Finally, the bureaucratic balancing act between fighting drugs and fighting terror is difficult. Real, real, difficult. For every head-slap where folks realize that resource smuggling and drug abuse go hand-in-hand, there are issues where really legitimate medical operations get attacked for their security value. I’m not sure I believe in the existence of a String Theory of violence, state destabilization, and drug trafficking, but I do believe that any state-building solution involves attacking the issue as a whole and not allowing bureaucratic pillow-fights to win the day.

Things are a bit of a mess, yes, but there are some really sharp minds trying to find solutions (Maria Costa, not me). I’d be interested in seeing a more localized form of clinical care get up-and-running where drug abuse is treated as a health risk, not a criminal act. It’s really a place where religious groups could come into play under state control as well, which seems to be a mutually beneficial idea in our region where state secularism clashes against Islamic identity. As for jurisdictional matters, well, let me get a bit more educated first.

Richard Holbrooke, everyone’s favorite envoy they love to hate to love, has an almost Biden-esque talent for saying things that make people angry. His most recent comment, that “Taliban is woven into the fabric of Pashtun society on both sides of the border with Pakistan and almost every Pashtun family has someone involved with the movement,” has, naturally, sparked anger from Pashtun families who do not have Taliban amongst their ranks (and that’s most Pashtun families, to be honest).

In response, Hazrat Sebghatullah Mojaddadi, Head of Meshrano Jirga (or upper house of the Afghan parliament), issued the following statement:

Mesharano Jirgs vehemently denounces the recent statement of Richart Holbrook, who had said in a gathering on 05 March 2010, that “there is a Talib in each Pashtun family. This kind of statement is considered to be unrealistic and baseless, and it is a major obstacle for strengthening peace and reconciliation in the country.

At the present time, Afghanistan is combating international terrorism alongside of international community, and has endured tremendous sacrifices for peace and stability both in the region and the world. The U.S. Special Representative should make efforts under the circumstance towards bringing national unity in the country, because terrorism is the common enemy and it should not be attributed specifically to a tribe or nation.

Mishrano Jirga as an independent body and representing the Afghan people in the Parliament, demands Mr. Holbrook to make every effort for strengthening the cooperation, extended by the United States and international community, with the people of Afghanistan, and should exercise caution in this sensitive environment of the country.

It’s kind of weird how the Obama administration has such a reliable knack for angering the government it claims to hope to want to help.

In 2008, I mocked Robert Young Pelton. I know, right? Shocking! But read why:

I believe he is saying there is something dishonorable, or unnatural, about people getting paid to participate in a war. This, along with the baseless assertion that “mercenaries” (a general, pejorative, and somewhat meaningless term) are “above the law,” forms the basis of his argument for… I guess more soldiers? Because that’s sort of what he’s saying.

Indeed, the essence of what Pelton was complaining about was the use of contractors replacing soldiers in many aspects of warfare. He even left a comment, complaining that George W. Bush “dove headfirst into the free market model of warfare and it doesn’t work.” He was fairly unequivocal: hiring non-soldiers to do the job of soldiers is an immoral thing, something to be undertaken only with the most serious consideration… Unless your own company is at stake. Then, it’s time to run to the press.

Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States…

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

I’m still gathering my thoughts on this, but think about the balls it takes to write a story in 2008 complaining about the government improperly using contractors, only to then complain in 2010 that your own multi-million dollar contract went south and may have been used to kill people. There are aspects to this story I’m still working through—how in the name of God a web video could satisfy the intel requirements for a lethal strike, for example, or just how many local informants Pelton endangered by going public as a participant in a lethal U.S. intelligence operation—but I’m amazed, and kind of sickened, that it wasn’t until his company got jilted on money that the man grew a conscience and went public with what turned out to be a shady deal.

It’s also kind of bizarre to see a man like Pelton—who brags about being smarter and awesomer and harder core and more cynical than anyone else—be used to completely by some IO flack. His company was promised millions of dollars to be included in what he knew to be a military intelligence gathering operation, but only went public when the money he was promised didn’t materialize.

Despite his pleas to the contrary, and despite some remarks by some of his acquaintances, I just don’t see how this ends up making Pelton look like a victim. Especially when contextualized in his previously vigilant stances against military contractors, he looks more like a willing participant who got burned and went public. A hypocrite, in other words.

I’m still asking around about this one—I’ll report back if I find anything.

The next time some American official mentions they want to engage in negotiations with the Taliban, please: laugh really hard.

The Afghan government was holding secret talks with the Taliban’s No. 2 when he was captured in Pakistan, and the arrest infuriated President Hamid Karzai, according to one of Karzai’s advisers.

The detention of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar — second in the Taliban only to one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar — has raised new questions about whether the U.S. is willing to back peace discussions with leaders who harbored the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Karzai “was very angry” when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had “given a green light” to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

Now, some of this we knew: Pakistan will not allow this to happen in a vacuum, etc. What’s shocking is the involvement of American intelligence agents in something so glaringly counterproductive. Back when he was first captured, I said we “paid a price for this, keep an eye out for what it might be.” Now we have some idea: we stabbed our host government in the back and told the remaining senior Taliban that should they ever wish to negotiate or participate in peace talks, we will arrest and torture them.

There is a slight caveat: many insurgent leaders use the promise of negotiations as a ploy to buy breathing room and respite from fighting; Baradar is not one of those leaders, however. As a well known “moderate,” such as they exist within the senior Taliban today, he was one of the few willing to actually discuss an end to the war with the U.S. and Kabul. Even that hope is gone now—and the result is a Taliban with documented evidence that approaching the negotiation table earns one a place in an ISI prison.

This isn’t the first time American and Pakistani greed has undermined a peace process—as we’ve discussed previously, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas the U.S. has a very reliable habit ever since 2004 or so of trying to murder any Pakistani Taliban leader who sits down at the negotiation table. The Pakistanis are hardly better—if you look at the “peace deals” and temporary truces drawn up in 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008, in the beginning it was Pakistan of the U.S. who violated those cease-fires, not the Pakistani Taliban. It’s only in recent years, once the Pakistani Taliban could be certain that negotiations were just a ploy meant to kill off some leaders, that they began using negotiations—which used to have an established history—as an empty ploy.

So to summarize: the United States has established a firm reputation in the AfPak area. It just isn’t a good one, considering how readily we renege on our word or lie about the prospects of peace just to grab or kill a leader here or there. The extremely halting “success” of any peace talks so far should neither surprise nor dismay us, for we are the reason they haven’t worked.

Previously:
Does the IJU Even Exist?
Oh, Actual Terrorists
Talking the IMU in Northern Afghanistan

There’s a pretty interesting essay at SWJ on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Afghanistan. Most of it is fine—I’d seriously question relying on Ahmed Rashid for meaningful information about Uzbeks, for example. There are some bits that are pretty questionable, however, and it makes me wonder just where and how we’re getting our information on this group:

The IMU has its origins in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The victory of the mujahidin and the collapse of Communism formed a nexus of burgeoning Islamism across Central Asia… It was during this period that the rebel Uzbek movement grew closer to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, and took on its current character.

So, for starters, that is classic Ahmed Rashid (Capt. Feitt even footnoted the terrible book Jihad). While a complete discussion of Rashid’s questionable grasp of the non-Afghanistan parts of Central Asia is best left for another time—Rashid’s work on the region contains a substantial number of factual errors—we have a broader history of Rashid’s Uzbek scholarship to contend with. Since 2002 or so, he has been screaming from the rooftops that we are on the razor’s edge of a wave of militant Uzbek-led Islamism sweeping across Central Asia and plunging the world into darkness. His bread and butter, aside from the Taliban, is scaring Westerners about Uzbeks, and it’s not just something he did in the fever environment right after September 11: he is still selling that fear to reputable news organizations like Reuters.

But Rashid is a sidenote to what’s really wrong with that paragraph. The IMU’s rise was unrelated to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Neither the “victory of the mujahidin” in Afghanistan—they spent the four years after withdrawal fighting to the death without really caring about the rest of the planet—nor the collapse of Communism formed a “nexus” of Islamism. Jumaboi Khojayev (later Juma Namangani), for example, was a Soviet paratrooper who killed mujahidin during the war in Afghanistan—not the other way around. It wasn’t until he formed Adolat with Tohir Yuldashev in 1991—two years after withdrawal from Afghanistan—that you could really say a “nexus” might have formed. And anyway, the group wasn’t banned until they began demanding Karimov impose sharia on all of Uzbekistan, which was basically a direct challenge to his rule and a major no-no (and they didn’t even become the IMU, an official resistance group, until about 1998).

Anyway, that essay continues discussing the large Uzbek population in Zabul and how it formed a welcoming environment for the IMU in 2003 or 2004 or something. Which is all well and good—Zabul has a big Uzbek population. The Uzbeks in the South have been allied with members of Taliban since its inception in the 1980s—AREU, for example, noted that in the Quetta refugee camps Uzbeks had allied with the Taliban to attack rival groups in neighboring camps. That being said, in Fragmentation in Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin notes that Mohammed Najibullah, the last communist president of the country, used a Uzbek militia to secure the Kandahar garrison prison when the mujahiding seized Spin Boldak. It should be no surprise that Uzbeks in Zabul, many of whom are repatriated from the contentious environment in Quetta, remain a bit restive. There are some brickbats about just what the IMU does and how it interacts with the locals, however, that should be explored.

It is difficult to understate the IMU’s importance to the local insurgency in Deh Chopan. IMU fighters are invariably more disciplined, motivated, and experienced than their Afghan counterparts. The IMU embraces a takfiri ideology dedicated to the overthrow of the secular Central Asian regimes and their replacement by an Islamic Caliphate. Like their al-Qa’ida allies, IMU militants see themselves as footsoldiers in a global jihad.11 Also like al-Qa’ida, the IMU has access to a deep reserve of funding from patrons across the Islamic world, enabling them to outfit their members with superior weaponry and tactical equipment. This allows the IMU to fill a natural role as trainers and advisors for the Afghan insurgency.

It almost sounds like he’s using IMU and Brigade 055 interchangeably. Let us be clear for a moment: the IMU, despite its façade of global Islamism, remains firmly fixated on Uzbekistan. Their takfiri “ideology” is only tangential—a means to an end. And they are so strong in northern Zabul because it is an enclave of Uzbeks in an otherwise Pashtun area. There are also pockets of IMU groups in Baghlan, Balkh, Takhar, and Kunduz—everywhere there are Uzbeks. They may talk global, but they act in pretty tight ethnic solidarity.

Which brings us to language, the only other part of this essay I feel like discussing. The IMU does not primarily speak in Russian. Some of them might, depending on where they grew up. But the IMU would not be able to communicate with local Uzbeks in Zabul with Russian (they most likely use Uzbek or even Dari). And they do not communicate with their followers and funders abroad in Russian. The IMU’s website is entirely in Uzbek. Indeed, speaking Russian goes against much of what the IMU stands for, since again they are primarily about ethnic solidarity and Uzbekistan for Uzbeks (and Islam). In fact, I’d challenge the assertion that the IMU is “no limited to Uzbeks”—especially since in the paragraph before Capt. Freitt alleged that the IMU worked very closely with al Qaeda and the Taliban—neither of which is particularly disposed toward speaking Russian.

Judge the rest of the essay for yourself, however. I found enough weird bits (all sourced to anonymous conversations with Special Forces soldiers), including the call to replicate the Anbar Surge in Zabul, that I’d have to question just how much homework went into this. Referencing a few news stories, Giustozzi, and Rashid is a good start, but the bulk of the information here boils down to “I spoke with some guys in my unit and here’s what they told me.” Which, again, is a good start, but there are so many unsupportable assertions, and a few errors of analysis, that I am skeptical this is much more than the standard old “Uzbeks are scary” line that seems dominant lately